Linwood Barclay: Parting Shot

He was struggling to hold it together.

“Hey, look,” I said. “Kids do dumb stuff.”

“Yes,” he said. “It wasn’t my fault. But... but if they’d tested me, I’d probably have been over the limit. Maybe... way over.”

“I drive over the limit all the time,” I said. “Still drive fine.”

Broadhurst nodded.

“So,” I said, “how’d you get the kid into the car?”

“It wasn’t... the first thing I did. I was thinking about the girl.”

“Of course.”

“I... I went over to see how bad it was. And... she was gone. I felt for a pulse, checked for any signs that she was alive, and...”

I nodded. “Right, she’d bought it. I’m guessing Jeremy was nearby.”

“Yes.”

“Passed out?”

He nodded.

“On a bench. I went over... I don’t know when I got the idea exactly. It just... came to me. I saw a way to get out of this. He’d... he’d already tried to take the car once. I figured, if I put him behind the wheel...”

“Quick thinking,” I said, with just a hint of admiration.

“I got my arms under him, but he was hard to move. He’s... heavy, and I’m not as young as I used to be.”

“Then...”

“I guess when the car hit the tree, it was loud enough to be heard. I mean, at least by one person,” Broadhurst said. “I looked, saw someone running. I thought... I thought, I can’t do it. I can’t pull it off. But then...”

“But then you saw who it was,” I said. I had a pretty good idea who it would turn out to be.

Broadhurst nodded. “I kind of blackmailed Bob into helping me. Said if I went to jail, our multimillion-dollar deal would fall through. He’d lose a fortune. On top of that, the McFadden girl, her father was one of the major investors. You think he’d buy into the project of a guy who ran down his daughter? Bad enough it was my car. Anyway, Bob didn’t take a lot of convincing, He helped me get Jeremy into the Porsche.” He took in a long breath. “Bob was the one who slammed Jeremy’s head into the steering wheel, so there’d be blood for a DNA match, if it came to that.”

“And then, when other partygoers showed up, you and Bob acted like you’d just got there.” I thought a moment. “Did Finch know?”

Broadhurst shook his head. “No. After you called him, he called me, said he was going to have to talk to Gloria, see if maybe there really were grounds for an appeal. I told him no, Jeremy had to have done it. And I think I convinced him. We’ve been friends a long time and he trusts me. And come on, let’s give Grant some credit. He got that kid off. That Big Baby defense was a stroke of genius. A long shot, but it worked. Everybody wins.”

Yeah, I thought. Everybody wins. I thought about Jeremy in my car, pounding his fists into his thighs.

“It was Bob who told you we were in Cape Cod,” I speculated. “You knew where to send Kiln because Bob was there when Madeline told Detective Duckworth.”

“It was his idea,” Broadhurst said.

That threw me.

“But I thought it was your idea, to put Jeremy behind the wheel.”

“Not that,” he said. “To have you and Jeremy killed. Bob said that was the only way out of this. But I know people, or people who know people, who can get that sort of thing done.”

And now, for the first time, he smiled.

“Which is why, if you think you’re going to shake me down, you’re mistaken.”

“Hey, come on,” I said.

“If I could find one Kiln, I can find another,” he said.

“Well...” I let uncertainty creep into my voice, “maybe I’ll go to the cops.”

Broadhurst’s smile turned into a grin. “And tell them what you did to Kiln? Killing a man in self-defense, that might fly, but burying him at sea? That kinda suggests something else, don’t you think?”

I licked my lips nervously. “Look, I wasn’t going to ask for that much. Fifty grand. That’s peanuts for a guy like you.”

He shook his head. “You’re an amateur, Weaver. A fool. You stuck your nose in where it didn’t—”

His eye caught something that made him stop. He was looking at the door. I turned, pushed myself up an inch to see over the top of the booth.

Barry Duckworth and two uniformed officers were approaching.

I settled back down in my seat, reached over to the small chrome rack from which I’d grabbed the sugar, and turned it around to reveal the wireless transmitter.

I said to Broadhurst, “Next time, strip-search the condiments.”

Brian Gaffney was cutting the lawn at his parents’ house when Jessica Frommer’s car stopped at the curb.

Albert had gone back to work today, but he had taken Constance’s car. He’d said something about his car being overdue for a service, that he didn’t want to run up any more miles on it until he’d taken it in to his mechanic.

Constance was at the grocery store picking up a few things, but she had borrowed Monica’s Volkswagen Beetle. Monica said she didn’t need her car today. Before Constance had left, Brian had told her at breakfast that he wanted to cut the grass. He needed something to do, he’d told her, but she had objected strenuously. He had to rest after all he’d been through, she said. He shouldn’t be doing anything physical.

Okay, Brian said. But as soon as his mother left in the Bug, he decided he was going to cut the grass anyway.

It would get his mind off things. It would get his mind off all the terrible things that had happened to him. It would also get his mind off whatever was going on between his parents. His mother hadn’t been taking her usual shots at his father. They were both very, very quiet.

Something was going on.

Brian wasn’t even sure he wanted to know what it was.

So he went out to the garage and swung open the door on the left.

There was his father’s car, looking, Brian thought, cleaner than he had ever seen it.

That was strange.

Considering that Brian worked at a place that cleaned cars, and also considering that he was able to give members of his family a discount — like, free — and considering even further the fact that he had seen this car go through the wash a couple of days before he went missing, why had his father gone to the trouble to wash it himself in the last day or so? Brian remembered that when his father found him, after Brian had walked out of the hospital, this was the car he’d been driving.

And it wasn’t this clean then.

Not only that, but even the floor of the garage was cleaner than Brian could ever remember seeing it. It was actually damp in a few places.

Weird.

He found the lawnmower at the back of the garage, checked that it had gas in it, and wheeled it out to the front yard. He did feel it in his ribs when he pulled the cord to start the machine up, but pushing it back and forth across the yard didn’t hurt at all.

He had about half of it done when Jessica’s car pulled up to the curb.

Brian killed the mower.

“Hey,” she said, getting out of the car. She’d left all the windows down, and Brian noticed that her kid was in the back seat.

“Hey,” Brian said.

“I went to the hospital to see you and they said you’d been discharged. When I didn’t find you at your apartment, I figured you might be here. I looked in the book and this was the only other Gaffney in Promise Falls.”

“Yeah, they let me out.”

“I’m sorry about everything,” she said. “I should have told you. I was going to tell you eventually, you know, that I was married. There just never seemed a good time.”

“Yeah, well.”

“Anyway, I wanted to say that.”

“Okay, then.” Brian shrugged. “I guess I should get back to it. I’m moving back in with my parents, so I want to help out and stuff.”